


Robin Hood not!fic

by TheBluestBluebird



Category: Robin Hood (2018)
Genre: Canon Rewrite, F/M, I watched this movie in 2018 in the theater because my thirst for Taron Egerton was that strong, Implied Sexual Content, Not!Fic, and then wrote this and forgot about it for two years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:34:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26992993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBluestBluebird/pseuds/TheBluestBluebird
Summary: The church does not officially recognize gender when considering it’s disciples. It cares a lot more about money, power, and looking passably large and impressive in a terrible yellow robe. As long as candidates have at least two out of those three attributes, they’re probably in.Or, a not!fic where I rewrote most of the plot of the Robin Hood (2018) movie to be more like what I wanted out of such a beautiful cast and concept.
Relationships: Maid Marian/Robin Hood
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Robin Hood not!fic

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote half of this in a fit of rage on my way home from the theater in 2018. It was supposed to go places, but unfortunately it's just been hanging around my google docs for the past few years instead. I'm releasing it out into the world now, in hopes that it will grow up to be a big strong fic on its own now that it's free of my fic graveyard folder.

Potential Robin Hood (2018) Rewrite

-This is happening in a world that is vaguely post-apocalyptic, although this is never explicitly stated. There are hints of it, in some of the language choices, and there are references to a ‘before’ kind of time, but it’s just the world they live in now and nothing is explicitly stated in the text. Maybe they’re talking about before and after the bubonic plague, who really knows?

  
-The story is told by rotating narrators-- Marian, Robin, John, Tuck. Maybe the Sheriff gets a chapter or two.

  
-The sheriff is a bastard child of a local lord who was given over to a Church foundling home as a toddler, once the lord had a legitimate heir.

  
-Robin is a bisexual disaster.

  
-Will isn’t necessarily a terrible person, but he cares more about his personal political gain than he does about the people around him, to a worrying extent.

  
-Locksley is not a big, profitable city. It’s a small town with a lot of immigrants and farmers and people who don’t necessarily follow the Church in the way that is encouraged.

  
-It borders on Sherwood forest, and the reason it isn’t very profitable as a town despite being a big holding is that a lot of that holding is just following the edge of the forest, and it’s a weird shape where not a lot can be done with it and so much of it is forest anyway that even though Locksley is a big holding, the lord can get away with a lot because aside from the location near the Nottingham mines, it’s not that lucrative except as a means for the larger town, more like a city really, of Nottingham to draw workers from.

  
-The crusades are much more homoerotic and extremely traumatizing, to the point where Robin doesn’t get many good descriptions of them.

  
-The Church is not the Catholic Church, but a different Church. They use the scriptures sometimes, but that’s most of what they have in common.

  
-It was a year for electing a new pope, after the former one died in an accident that is so very mysterious, nobody knows how such a healthy man could have just died in his

bed like that, hmm, and so this is why all of the holy war maneuvering is happening at the time it is, because the Bishops and the Cardinals are trying to angle to fill the power vacuum and get what they want done before the new pope is determined and their futures for the next few years are set.

  
-The sheriff doesn’t hate Robin, necessarily. The thing with taking him out of his home and wanting him dead? That’s mostly because he wants Marian to stop fucking around with the son of a small-time lord and to get with that Will guy who keeps fucking with his city. She seems like such a controlling kind of girl, she’s done well enough with the lord’s son, she would probably do well with the political rabble-rouser as well, and the Sheriff can make that happen.

  
-The rich and powerful tend to keep stables, as a sign of wealth, but also because there’s a whole subculture of horse racing that just didn’t get addressed in the film because it wasn’t really relevant.

  
-The mines are coal mines, because that’s what people are using to heat their homes now.

  
-The Friar is mostly an academic, and secondly a holy man. He’s actually very good at keeping the sanctity of the confession box, but he gets nervous around the sheriff.

  
-There is also a whole subculture of dressing according to the most ridiculous fashions as determined by the Queen of England, who is a regular person who is taking her role a little bit too far and should really be told to tone it down.

  
-Sewing machines explicitly exist.

  
-There might be a Youthful Flashback scene with Robin and Marian and watching an adult sew something on a sewing machine, because they definitely exist in this world.

  
-John is Royally Pissed about many things, including his name, what the fuck was that, teach people to say his name or make it some personal secret, or just make him deadpan that yes, his name is John, don’t bother. There could have been a bonding moment, but instead it was just white people being unwilling to put in the effort to say his name right.

  
-Marian is fully appreciative of Robin’s mouth and that cute/dumb thing he does when he leaves it open a little bit too long.

  
-Robin and Marian are both concussed after the wagon flip in the middle battle.

  
-The people of Nottingham and Locksley take either Very Poorly or Very Well to forest life, and I haven’t decided which one is better yet.

  
-There are also some more farmers from Locksley holding who have just been like...chilling in the forest this entire time and could have helped out, if anyone had asked them, but no, nobody invites the farmers to the revolution, it’s always all the city folk.

  
-Marian is Theirs, though, so she’s still cool with them even though she found herself a fancy husband and fucked off to the mining city once her pet lordling got himself killed, didn’t she.

  
-Marian waited like, half a year before she and Will decided that getting married would be a help for both of them and they should just do it, because he’s dead anyway, thinks Marian, and she would be a great help in my politics, to have such an intelligent wife on my side, Will things, and finally they’re going to be so caught up in dealing with each other that maybe they’ll stop trying to deal with me, the Sheriff thinks.

  
-John doesn’t lose his hand, because that was dumb. He loses the use of his hand, maybe. There was too much damage to the tendons from the initial chop, and then he took the rest of it off himself when he arrived in England, in order to get fit with something more useful than paralyzed flesh.

  
-He did this literally the minute he got off the boat, which, in retrospect, may not have been the greatest idea.

  
-Robin is continually bruised from falling like an idiot.

  
-Robin gets the wind knocked out of him at one point, still from falling like an idiot, until nobody comes to find him and he has to get himself up again before he gets into worse trouble.

  
-There are a lot of father-son moments between John and Robin, but not in a way that makes it weird, just in a way that makes the whole son subplot thing make sense.

  
-John has a family and a backstory of his own that should really get investigated. He wasn’t a great political leader, but he was the commander of a battalion, and he was good at that. He wouldn’t usually fight with his family, but it was his first time fighting with one of his children also in the fight, and it scared him so much that he kept his kid close to him.

  
-That didn’t turn out so well.

  
-Robin learned to live in the woods from a yeoman who stopped in Locksley for a summer when he was seventeen, just after he had met Marian. Robin claims that the yeoman, Thom, taught him how to handle a bow. Marian thinks that there was probably a lot more handling of some other things, during the time that those two spent out in the woods together, but she’s not saying anything.

  
-Robin remains a bisexual disaster.

-The story starts when each of the major characters is small? Maybe?

  
-Marian as a tiny angry kid is necessary for me personally to see.

  
-Robin is also a terrible tiny child

  
-Maybe the Sheriff is just coming into his power?

  
-John is seeing his tiny child do something for the first time

  
-Tuck is being promoted or something. Finishing a research maybe. Or getting a breakthrough in his political dissent schemes. Or being moved to Nottingham.

-The story defs. follows through Marian and Robin’s first meeting

-The Sheriff being moved into more and more power and also becoming uncomfortable with the church

  
-John seeing his men fall again and again and fantasizing about doing something to cut the English soldiers off from the roots.

  
-Tuck is seeing more and more political dissent happening, but he’s also seeing so much good and so many good people in his travels over the area and he’s theologically conflicted but also hilariously up on all the gossip in every local town because of confession.

-But then things are sad when Robin and Marian are teenagers

  
-This takes a lot of time though because they’re the main characters here and I care the most about them. There may or may not be additional pwp bits added in here because nobody can stop me.

  
-John’s story takes a very sad turn for the worse. Maybe he keeps loosing men? His early plans to cut off England fail dramatically? Something meaningful. He is not allowed to have a dead wife though, she’s just chilling somewhere else. She got away from the active war zones and is going to start a revolution in her own right somewhere else.

  
-There are also a good number of interludes that are just Tuck listening to ridiculous gossip about these tiny English towns and the shit that goes down there. It’s not even necessarily relevant to the plot or Highly Dramatic, it’s just funny. To break up the depressing bits.

  
-Robin has to seduce at least several people during this time this is very important to me.

  
-Will Scarlet is introduced by his actual name and he and Robin have some kind of a fight to start their rivalry in something other than stealing a girl who has a brain and makes her own choices. Will is probably being a bit of a dick to small children who are doing something moderately terrible that they should have explained to them, and Will is doing the yelling thing instead of the explaining thing and at least two kids are obviously in tears and Robin is like dude chill tf out here the kid is crying, they didn’t know better and then they have a rivalry between being Nice and being Right and it’s founded in fundamentally different views of the world and it makes sense for them to not get along.

  
-Marian likes Will well enough though, and this is a point of contention between her and her bf because Robin doesn’t tell her about Will being a dick because he knows that she likes him and he doesn’t want to come between them like that for no reason after Marian already got mad about the other times that Robin doesn’t like particular people, and it’s the start of some communication issues that will pick up again after the crusades.

-The crusades! This is where we pick up the Sheriff again.

  
-The Sheriff isn’t intentionally picking off all of the youngest lords of the manors that surround Nottingham so that the towns won’t have a voice to speak for them when he needs to draft some more people for the coal mines, but sometimes that’s just how things work out, it seems.

  
-And maybe he wants to please the church by becoming one of the most productive cities and earning himself more wealth while he does so, but who wouldn’t want to do that?

  
-His lords are a little terrible, to be fair. It would serve most of them right to see their youngest, strongest heirs go off to fight for the church. It would be their Civic Duty, that’s what it would be.

  
-John is having issues with his men. They’re doing very well, surprisingly well against the latest batches of crusaders, (what are they crusading for? Well, nobody really knows that. They sure as hell aren’t looking for the holy land, not here in this section of their so-called Arabia that’s so far north it’s actually (somewhere else entirely). Also, there’s been so much bs with the holy land in the recent years that it can’t be for that. It’s for reasons that nobody is going to explain but probably can be boiled down to religion in some capacity other than the holy land because they didn’t mention that at all in the movie because I don’t know why. If the Met gala can talk about the history of the church, a movie using the crusades as a major plot point should also talk about the history of the church.

  
-Tuck has some kind of major political revelation based on this political turning. This is never explained beyond using it as a reason for him to not be popular with the Sheriff and the other clergymen. (Clergy-people. Some of them are women. The church does not officially recognize gender when considering it’s disciples. It cares a lot more about money, power, and looking passably large and impressive in a terrible yellow robe. As long as candidates have at least two out of those three attributes, they’re probably in.)

-Robin likes war, at first. He gets to meet other men who are in the same position as he is. Like him, they care more about their people and their families than they do about the glory of the Church, and they aren’t fans of violence beyond what’s needed for hunting and maybe wrestling, sometimes. They’re good people, some of them, and the skinny boy they put him with as a partner is even younger than he is, and also similarly inclined to be willing to share body heat, as it were, and more than body heat, if you catch my drift.

  
-Robin is going to remain a bixesual horny disaster throughout all of this.

  
-John feels that something is different. The crusaders are shifting, getting weaker in their hold on some of the cities, and it’s pure dumb luck when one of his men thinks to string up the skinny boy that they catch while another one of the English is taking out their sniper. (only without the word sniper, because there is a vague attempt at period language, sometimes, even though this isn’t strictly a period piece). John isn’t the one who comes up with this plan, because even though he hates the English for perpetuating this stupid war, he hates to see a man that young strung up like that.

  
-John is not captured during that battle, but his hand is mangled beyond repair, and it makes him sloppy, and the next time a group of English soldiers gets the jump on his men, they are all captured.

  
-John has some hope of being ransomed, maybe. He knows that he’s of more use as a political and military pawn than he is as a common prisoner for the Church men to sell into slavery, and his hand is going to have to come off anyway, so if he just waits long enough he’s sure he could make a plan to get his men out of here.  
-He doesn’t get that time.  
-His son is going to die, he’s going to have to watch him die, and John-who-is-not-yet-John has never felt like this before.

  
-He recognizes the English boy who tries to save his boy. He tried to kill that kid, and he might have tried again, because that kid was a soft kind of target who might have been John’s point of escape from the rest of the English bastards.

  
-There’s not really a point of escaping now. His son is dead, just as dead as all his men will be, as this senseless slaughter continues.

  
-But. John sees the English commander, who he’s seen is a terrible kind of man, whose soldiers John has seen flinch away from him as he walks by, who doesn’t keep enough women in the camp to have an established area for the men to go and fuck people who they aren’t paying to do so, and John sees this commander shoot one of his own men to get him out of this place and send him back home, and John thinks that this boy could still be his ticket out of this English hellhole of a military camp and into the roots of the Church.

-The trip home to England is a terrifying mess of flashbacks that doesn’t entirely make sense, but both of the characters who are making this journey are in extreme physical and emotional pain at this point, so it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s a hot mess of injury recovery and broken thoughts of how the recent past might have gone, and an absence of any thoughts at all about how the future will go.

  
-There’s some flirting with suicidal ideation.

  
-There’s also some vague political machinations but we’re going to continue to not really deal with that, because nothing about the politics of the movie made sense and I don’t want to build an entire political landscape at this exact moment before I brush up on my crusades history and think about how to incorporate it into the post-apocalypse, faux-medieval nightmare that is this setting.

-Meanwhile at home

  
-Marian is fine with Will. She’s taking a less aggressive political stance than she wants to, because it won’t reflect well on Will’s politics, but it’s fine, she’s dealing.  
-She’s also rallying a small army of farm kids and city children to act as a tiny network of spies.

  
-Tuck is helping her, when he can. Will approves, because Will is shockingly invested in the power of the Church and believes that a friar can’t be all that bad, even if he is one of the ponce Locksley’s men.  
-can I use ponce as a word or is that homophobic

-Robin is home and he doesn’t even have the energy to really be pissed about any of this. He’s not stupid. He’s tired.  
-He defs sleeps for at least like a day in the weird little forest house because his horse is too tired to make it from the coast to his holding in a single day and honestly, after taking an arrow deep into the muscles of his side, Robin is too tired as well.  
-John is pissed to be wasting time like this.

-Most of the part when Robin returns home and finds the manor a wreck and goes to see Tuck and Marian can stay the same

-John tells him in no uncertain terms to get it together and take shit down. Win back what is his right. John knows how these men work, that’s allegedly what they ground their war in, after all. Taking back what they believe is rightfully theirs.

-Robin goes home and is allowed to get roaringly drunk for exactly one day. On the second day, John gets drunk with him. They are allowed to have time to mourn, men like them who have seen so much.

  
-On the third day, John is pissed in addition to having been pissing drunk the evening before, and he can have a confrontation with Robin about not drowning in a bottle.

-The Marian argument goes like this

  
-She’ll be a target too (says John)  
-I won’t tell her anything (says Robin)  
-Do u really think u can do that? U gotta wait to take her back kiddo  
-First of all fuck you I have self control and second of all fuck u she’s her own person  
-shit kid sorry sorry my wife would also have agreed with that u right  
-Still don’t trust ur mouth around her though  
-Fair but also fuck u  
-Direct that anger at them not me  
-Fuck all of them then. Especially the sheriff.  
-I would drink to that but we’re done with that for a while  
-Hey lol did u know the sheriff is a bastard like literally in addition to figuratively  
-Oh. Cool. That will factor into my plan for manipulating him

  
-Glad to be of service

  
-they do not have sex at this time because John has higher standards than this hot mess express, but they could. If this were a different kind of rewrite, they might.

(and this is as far as I got before school took over my life again. Enjoy??)


End file.
